Fuu stared at him in silence.
Everyone seemed to be secretly looking at what was going to happen next. It was not daily that you see a gate Challenge with the condition of being a slave for life.
The monitoring operators hadn't looked back at their screens. The Exterminators in the cafeteria had moved to the glass windows. Everyone was waiting for the same thing.
Fuu's expression cycled through several things in quick succession. Disbelief first. Then the instinct to deny. Then the instinct died, because the evidence was very simple and very public, and Fuu had never been good at accepting simple things that went against him.
What came out the other side was anger.
"That's impossible," he said loudly.
His voice had an audience and he knew it.
"Five minutes and forty-eight seconds." He laughed. "In a gate that was secretly a Two-Star. With no party." He looked around at the facility floor, addressing the room. "That doesn't happen. That's not a real number. Something is wrong with the monitoring system, or the record, or—"
Hide stood up with the contract papers in one hand, and looked at Fuu.
Fuu's voice stopped mid-sentence.
"This is a public place," Hide stated, glaring him in the eye. "Didn't your mother teach you manners?"
Silence.
The word mother landed in the room with a specific weight, because everyone remembered what Fuu had said in the cafeteria.
Fuu's jaw tightened, but he said nothing.
Hide looked at him for one more second.
Then, in a voice that hadn't changed in volume or heat at all, he said:
"On your knees."
The facility floor went so quiet that the hum of the gate monitors was suddenly audible.
Fuu's face went through several more things. Being told to kneel in public, in front of an audience, by the person he'd spent two years treating as beneath him, it was not a great experience.
He looked at the papers that Hide was holding. It had his own signature, written at the front desk with his bloody jaw and his party member's hand on his arm, agreeing to terms that had seemed like nothing at the time because he hadn't believed for one second that he would lose.
The fury didn't leave his face. But his weight shifted back and he lowered himself to his knees.
It was not graceful at all. His eyes were fixed on a point on the floor in front of him that he was pretending was somewhere else.
Nobody on the facility floor made a sound.
Hide looked at him for a moment. Then he turned and addressed the rest of Fuu's party — the woman, the second man, the large sturdy boy still propped between them with his broken leg.
"You can go," he said simply. "You are free." Then he pointed at Fuu. " And you, follow me."
He walked toward the exit without looking back. Fuu stood back up and simply followed, not wanting to even see the faces of his party members.
The facility doors opened onto cold air, the natural late afternoon cold, the sky was the flat grey of a day that had never quite committed to sun or cloud.
Hide walked and behind him, Fuu followed.
Neither of them spoke.
Fuu glared at Hide's back with killing intent. He was thinking about how easy it would be. One strike. The person in front of him had no weapon.
But for some reason, his feet stayed exactly where they were.
'Five minutes and forty-eight seconds.'
He had taken thirty-two minutes with three other people, one of whom could break apart stone with his bare hands, and they had barely made it out with all four of them intact. This person in front of him had done it faster than half of them combined. Alone, and In a gate that had secretly been a full rank higher than what either of them had signed up for.
From that fact, a shiver ran down his spine. He was not the same Hide from three days ago.
They walked for perhaps twenty minutes. The area around them changed from commercial buildings to quieter streets, quieter streets giving to a district that sat between the residential zones and the city's outer edge.
Then, at the end of one of those streets there was a steel gate.
Beyond it, there were rows of headstones in uneven lines, some old and leaning, some newer and still upright, the grass between them long enough to brush the lower edges of the stones.
Fuu stopped at the gate.
Something about a cemetery in the late afternoon light, with no one else in it, following a person he was afraid to admit he was afraid of. It made him a little... uncertain.
"What are we doing here?" he asked.
Hide had already pushed the iron gate open.
He looked back over his shoulder.
"Slaves don't ask questions."
Fuu's teeth ground together. "You bas-" Several words stacked up behind his lips and he chose not to release any of them.
"And slaves don't curse their masters to their face either," Hide said, turning away again.
Fuu stood at the gate for two seconds. Then he followed him inside.
The cemetery was quiet, even their footsteps on the grass were muffled. The cold was still here but softer somehow.
Hide moved between the rows without hesitating as he followed the path.
Then he stopped in front of a headstone.
Fuu stopped behind him.
The headstone was not too old and not too new. The stone was a pale grey, clean at the edges, with no moss yet at the base. The inscription was simple.
ERIN VOLTER
'An Excellent Gate Researcher and a brave mother'
Hide stood in front of it and said nothing for a full minute.
Fuu fell silent as he looked at Hide, and the grave in front of him. His breathing was erratic and uncertain.
After a minute, Hide stepped aside and looked at Fuu.
"Clean it," he instructed. "And then apologize."
Fuu stared at him. "To a grave?"
Hide didn't say anything, but glared at him intently. And that sent a shiver down his spine.
He gulped hard and then crouched down. He removed the small pieces of dead grass that had gathered at the base of the stone. He straightened the small offering someone had left on the grave's front edge, that was a single dried flower, placed long enough ago that it had gone papery and pale, but still there.
He cleaned the face of the stone with the sleeve of his jacket and It took him almost ten minutes.
Then he stood before the grave and his expression did something complicated that he didn't have words for and wouldn't have used them if he had.
He bowed, his back parallel to the ground, held for a count of three and then slowly said. "I'm sorry,"
Hide looked at him and nodded once, then turned and walked to the nearest bench and sat on it.
Fuu straightened and walked over slowly, stopping a few feet away.
"What do you want with me now," he asked carefully.
Hide looked at him and shrugged. "Nothing right now," he shook his head. "Go home."
"..."
"Go," Hide emphasized. "You'll hear from me when I need something. Until then you're free."
Fuu stood there, waiting for Hide to say something to mock him further. But nothing happened.
"...You're serious?" he blinked.
Hide looked at him sideways with narrowed eyes. "I told you to go. Or are you too interested in serving me?"
Fuu turned on his heel and walked toward the cemetery gate without another word.
He walked normally until he reached the iron gate. He pushed through it and the latch clicked behind him.
Then he ran.
Hide sat on the bench in the empty cemetery and let out a slow breath through his nose.
The flat grey light had shifted slightly toward evening. The dried flower on his mother's grave was visible from here, pale against the pale stone.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then, without turning around he spoke.
"How long are you going to sit in that tree like a monkey?"
The tree three meters to his left rustled and a figure fell out of it. Like a helpless cat, the person arrived at the ground in a heap and rolled once before coming to rest on the grass.
He lay there for a half second. Then he stood up, dusted off his coat with both hands, and adjusted something on his face.
A mask. White with painted diamond eyes and a wide red smile. And a bog red nose, signifying that it was a joker's mask. It looked completely incongruous on a person in a full formal suit with a perfectly pressed lapel and good shoes.
He stood up straight and looked at Hide.
He spread his arms in a theatrical shrug. What can I say.
Hide raised his right hand. A curl of orange-blue flame rose from his palm. He shaped it into a compact ball and threw it in a flat line toward the masked figure.
The masked man's reaction was immediate.
"HELP! HELP! HELP—"
He was already moving, stepping sideways, one hand going up, the dramatic shrieking of someone performing distress for an audience of one.
The fireball reached him and at the last moment, he caught it with one hand, the flame wrapping around his palm and fingers the way fire wraps around a torch.
He spun and made a single full rotation, arm extended, the fireball orbiting his hand in a neat arc.
When he completed the spin, the flame was gone.
He looked at Hide.
The painted smile on the mask was bright in the evening grey.
"Dear," he said, in the cheerful voice of someone genuinely unbothered. "That was dangerous... What if it actually hit me?"